The Divergent Jobs Market

Great article on technology and the future from Marc Andreessen but what stood out for me is this:

Secondly, many people in the U.S. and around the world lack the education and skills required to participate in the great new companies coming out of the software revolution. This is a tragedy since every company I work with is absolutely starved for talent. Qualified software engineers, managers, marketers and salespeople in Silicon Valley can rack up dozens of high-paying, high-upside job offers any time they want, while national unemployment and underemployment is sky high. This problem is even worse than it looks because many workers in existing industries will be stranded on the wrong side of software-based disruption and may never be able to work in their fields again. Theres no way through this problem other than education, and we have a long way to go.

At the moment we’re trying to hire some seasonal IT workers and we’ve had a very, very small pool of marginally qualified people to choose from. This in the face of 9.1% national unemployment and one of the deepest recessions in U.S. history. It’s a very strange world right now in the tech field.